Word: claudius
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Philip Bosco exhibits the clarity of diction we have come to expect of him, but it cannot be said that his King Claudius is one of his better portrayals. He does not seem at all royal. Murderer he may be, but Claudius is also an undeniably efficient administrator. In the Play Scene, he gives no signs of paying attention to what is going on until his cue to break the party up. This scene is, however, visually appealing. Five attendants stand about with ten-foot poles topped by simulated deer's heads, orange streamers, and flaming torches; the resulting Hallowe...
Novelist Gore Vidal has obviously read his Robert Graves. His ninth novel (and his first in a decade) is an attempt to apply to Julian's life the same smooth blend of erudition and dramatic flair, of scholarship leavened with wit that set the urbane tone for I, Claudius and Claudius, the God. Vidal is a resourceful writer, and he has mastered the manner to perfection. Only his subject eludes...
...tenths of the canal flows through its territory. When the project is linked up with the Sâone and Rhône rivers through a complex system of canals, it will provide an unbroken waterway from Marseille to Rotterdam, a route first visualized by the Roman generals Nero Claudius Drusus and Gaius Antistius Vetus some 2,000 years...
...Hume Cronyn's Polonius is devilishly fine, a battered human filing cabinet of platitudes who has achieved diplomatic immunity to everything but the sound of his own voice. And George Rose's First Gravedigger is a roguish, low-comic word prankster. But Alfred Drake's King Claudius is too suavely ingratiating to have killed a brother and seized a crown. He is more like mine host of the Elsinore Hilton. Eileen Her-lie is a middle-aged matron with diction; it is easier to imagine her at bridge than in the "rank sweat of an enseamed...
...John Callum's Laertes is simply a stupid, shallow young man. Claudius slaps down the rebellion that Laertes leads to the palace and lectures him like a boy, and the depth of Ophelia's passion at her father's death shows up his foolishness. He stabs Hamlet not as a desperate act on the part of an honorable man, but as the venal act of a fool. The textual validity of the interpretation is somewhat questionable; Hamlet, after all, thinks of Laertes as a "very noble youth." Callum, however, makes a consistent and plausible character...